But not today, today I decided to buy a cable for my mobile phone to download pictures straight to my computer - and what a joyous experience this turned out to be.

I knew at the outset I was making a mistake, but sometimes I'm just too pigheaded to listen to my own voice of commons sense and off I trotted, into town to buy a DCA-540 data cable. No problem, I know what I want and there are at least 20 phone shops in the centre of Manchester (they have spread like some disease of late) - one of them will have what I'm looking for. And one of them did - the second one I visited in fact. It was all too simple.

I got back to my office, plugged in the cable and put the disk in the computer to load the software and waited... and waited... the disk was blank, completely blank - there was no software on it, there was nothing at all.

So I took it back. The guy at the shop didn't believe me and handed it to his associate to check. I waited, I waited some more.... and I waited.

After about twenty minutes his associate (who was about 14 years old - but still wearing a suit) came back from the hole in which he had earlier scurried and announced - to my utter surprise of course - that the disk was completely blank and that as they didn't have any more I could have my money back. "Lucky I didn't buy the warranty," I thought, and trotted off (with my £20.00 reimbursed) to check the other mobile phone shops.

Not one of them had the cable I was after, but what they did have were zombies... hundreds of zombies.

It was Dawn of the Dead in real life.

My advice is never, under any circumstances, go into a mobile phone shop, ever.

Firstly and contrary to what I would have expected, they are all so busy - busy with customers. Most of them had queues just to get to speak to somebody, but as far as I could tell, nobody was buying anything, they were all 'browsing'.

It was horrific. Every shop I went into had about ten people, all between the ages of 16 and 25, checking out the latest phones, discussing ringtones and what colour covers they could get. It reminded me of how record shops used to be about 20 years ago when I used to browse the Prog Rock sections with my greasy hair and dirty jeans - but at least I used to buy something now and again. This was bizarre - these people seemed hypnotised by the phones on offer, just gadgets for talking over long distances but they have become such status symbols that people, hundreds of people, stroll from shop to shop to gawp at the latest models.

Why? What's the attraction? What does it matter if you have a Blognox 250e or a Rabbit GX220 with green-ear technology? I'd rather hang about train stations collecting train numbers than this, and I don't see much fun in that either.

And if you think I am exagerrating about the vacuous morons that are drawn to mobile phone shops go and look for yourself (contrary to my advice above). This is as near to hell as I believe you can get. No burning flames and devils with pointy sticks, just giant shopping malls full of mobile phone shops to visit and chat about upgrades and handsfree sets. Or handsfree solutions as one notice I read called them.

Mobile phone shops are proof beyond doubt that if God exists He is not omnipresent - for His power certainly doesn't extend into these temples of banality.

In order to produce three sauces I made some curry sauce without any chilli but with loads of aromatic spices fried with the onions (green and black cardamon, fennel, fenugreek, cinnamon, clove, neem, hing, aniseed, cumin, coriander) and used this as the base. (I also used some of this to flavour the soup). It was pretty simple but looked and tasted great.


Cake Blog

Special Ladoo: From the Ambala Sweet House. Ladoo are balls of stuff flavoured with things. That's about all I can say really, I think one of the things was pistacio and another was carrot.


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